


Soft Focus

by Kerioth



Category: Mairelon the Magician - Patricia Wrede
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-23
Updated: 2011-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-27 21:31:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/300247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kerioth/pseuds/Kerioth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>focus</i> (noun) – a point on which attention, activity, etc. is directed or concentrated. In magic, an object used to concentrate or direct magical power, often used for complex or demanding spells.</p><p>Kim and Mairelon take a break from studying to help a friend with a problem.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Soft Focus

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AlexElizabeth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlexElizabeth/gifts).



Kim sighed. It was a lovely morning outside, and she was struggling to concentrate on her work. Mairelon had left her to practice a new spell while he looked up references in some of the books on the shelves lining one side of the study. As if in response to Kim’s thoughts, there was a quiet knock on the door and a short, freckle-faced apprentice peered inside.

 

“Pardon me,” he said, “but there’s a gentleman here asking for you, Mr. Merrill.”

 

“We’re busy,” Mairelon replied without turning from the shelves. “Tell him to leave a message or come back later.”

 

The apprentice rolled his eyes at Mairelon’s back, causing Kim to stifle a snort of humor. When he spoke, however, it was in the same polite tone he’d used before. “I did ask him to come another time, sir, but he insists that he needs a consultation, and that he cannot simply leave a message. He also seems to be familiar enough with the college to come looking for you, so you are likely to be bothered one way or another.”

 

“Oh, very well then, show him up.” Mairelon, when he turned around, looked resigned, but Kim saw in his eyes a faint glimmer of the same curiosity she felt about the unexpected interruption.

 

Kim spent the next moments reviewing their collective acquaintance and trying to determine who would need to disturb them at the Royal College of Magic instead of waiting for traditional calling hours.

 

Not that she and Mairelon ever kept calling hours – they were far more likely to spend whole weeks in “their” study at the College, a room Mairelon had appropriated as soon as Kim started her journeyman’s work. While teaching Kim, Mairelon was rediscovering a seemingly endless supply of questions he had first had when doing his own journeyman’s work, and once he got a question firmly lodged in his mind, nothing could keep him from following it through to its conclusion. Well, almost nothing. Kim had found one or two things that could distract him from even the most involved research, but she preferred to save them for what she thought of as “true emergencies.” While the news of their persistent visitor had pulled Mairelon away from his studies for now, Kim knew it would only be a temporary distraction from the debate over whether the Chinese or the Italians were the first to come up with a reliable direction spell.

 

Kim’s curiosity about the visitor was quickly satisfied by his appearance – Kim vaguely recognized him, but couldn’t place him in her memory until he introduced himself as Robert Choiniet. He had been part of a group of ersatz druids from Ranton Hill that Kim and Mairelon met while tracking down part of the stolen Saltash Set several years before, and although they hadn’t met since then, Robert stood out in Kim’s memory as one of the more sensible members of that group.

 

“Terribly sorry to disturb you,” said Robert, “but I have an, er, unusual problem, and you were the first people I thought of who might be able to help me out. Experience and all that.”

 

Mairelon merely raised an eyebrow at this, as it was true that he and Kim had experience in dealing with unusual problems, although the only person who typically consulted them was Lord Shoreham.

 

“It started,” said Robert, prodding the leg of a nearby table with the toe of his boot, “at one of our meetings – the Sons of the New Dawn – and really it’s Jonathan’s fault, only it happened to me and I really didn’t want to bring him with me all the way to Town; he’d be sure to make such an awful bother and –“

 

Mairelon cut short Robert’s convoluted and increasingly rapid explanation by coughing impatiently. When Robert stopped and looked up, Mairelon asked, “What, _exactly_ , is it that happened to you?”

 

“Sorry,” said Robert, looking chastened. “May I sit down?”

 

“If it’ll help you with the story,” said Kim. She could tell that Robert was having a hard time putting whatever it was into words – he had seemed sensible the last time they met and was barely making sense now – but she, too, was becoming impatient. As Robert moved to sit in a chair across from Kim, she noticed that he had been carrying a wooden box, which he set down on the table between them. He did not, however, refer to the box when continuing his story.

 

“Jonathan had a new spell he wanted to try out, and he said he needed the whole group for it.” Robert paused to look first at Kim, then at Mairelon, and smiled crookedly before he continued. “You probably think of the Sons of the New Dawn as a ridiculous charade, but it does often provide good opportunities to experiment. No spell is too silly to try at least once, and someone is always willing to try it. The spell Jonathan had us attempting was a variation on the basic focus spell—“

 

“Joint or individual?” asked Mairelon, clearly unable to keep himself from interrupting.

 

“ _Mairelon_ ,” said Kim, “we’ll never hear the whole thing if you keep on like that.”

 

Mairelon grinned wryly at Kim and gestured for Robert to continue.

 

“Everything seemed to be going well: even Jon was less particular about adding flourishes and bad Latin, but then right at the end, when I was supposed to be concentrating on the object for my focus, I was – distracted. We were each creating our own, but Jon’s basic theory was that creating them together would give each individual focus some kind of power boost, beyond the amount of power we put in.”

 

“What distracted you?” prompted Mairelon. Kim smiled to herself, as she could tell from the fact that Mairelon had come closer as Robert spoke and was now practically looming over them that he was carefully controlling his impulse to bombard Robert with questions about the magical theory involved.

 

“This,” said Robert, grabbing the wooden box he’d brought with him and opening it to reveal a small, white rabbit crouched inside on a few handfuls of straw. The rabbit lifted its head and twitched its nose at Kim, then lifted its long ears and balanced its front paws on the side of the box.

 

“Oh, no you don’t,” Robert told the rabbit, quickly pushing it back down and securing the lid before it could hop out.

 

“Why on _earth_ ,” asked Mairelon, “did you bring it with you?”

 

“That’s where we come to the problem,” said Robert. “It seems that when the rabbit broke my concentration, it became the new object for my focus.”

 

“You mean some of your magic’s been put into that rabbit?” said Kim.

 

“Well, yes,” replied Robert, not meeting her eyes.

 

“And how did a rabbit get into the lodge of the Sons of the New Dawn in the first place?” asked Mairelon. “I presume that’s where you were working?”

 

Robert nodded. “The rabbit belongs to my sister. It’s her pet. She’s recently taken to playing in the lodge when we’re not using it, and the rabbit must have gotten away from her.” Robert frowned at the rabbit’s box, and Kim thought from looking at the expression on his face that he was silently calling the rabbit a number of very colorful names.

 

“Can’t you just recast the focus spell with a different object in mind?” she asked.

 

“Have _you_ ever tried working magic with a rabbit in the room? The thing won’t hold still!” Robert cried. “And I didn’t dare ask any of the others to help me with it – I’d never hear the end of it.”

 

Before either Kim or Mairelon could think of another question, they were interrupted by a knock on the study door, followed almost immediately by Lord Kerring.

 

“Morning,” said Kerring, sounding unusually chipper, which Kim now knew meant that he was avoiding someone looking for him. “I just wanted to pop over and check on that paper on rookery magic Kim’s been promising me. How’s the work coming?”

 

“Fine,” Kim bit off, fussing with the spell diagrams on the desk in front of her. She really didn’t want to have a discussion about her latest assignment from Kerring, as it was still lying on the desk at Grosvenor Square where she’d left it after tea with Lady Wendall the week before.

 

“In fact,” put in Mairelon, “we were hoping you could help us out with a problem.” Kim silently thanked him for the distraction, and continued to stack and shuffle papers as Mairelon invited Kerring to sit with him at the next table while he summarized their discussion with Robert. Mairelon ended the explanation by showing Kerring the rabbit-focus, while Robert glanced nervously between Kim and Mairelon, at a loss for what to say or do next.

 

“Hmm,” said Kerring, stroking the rabbit’s ears while trying to keep it from escaping the box. “This reminds me of a story I heard once about a marquis who made a focus out of a chocolate pot.”

 

“A chocolate pot?” said Robert, sounding torn between confusion and amusement.

 

Kerring shrugged. “I understand it was an accident.”

 

“How did he fix it?” asked Kim, forgetting in her curiosity that she was trying to avoid drawing Kerring’s attention.

 

“He broke the chocolate pot.”

 

“Well, that doesn’t help me,” said Robert. “I can’t just kill the rabbit. Cinthy would never forgive me.”

 

“Cinthy?” asked Kerring and Mairelon together.

 

“My sister, Jacinth,” explained Robert. “She’s fourteen, and she loves this rabbit. She’s sure to be worried about it already, but I need to get this resolved before I let her have the rabbit back.”

 

Kim, who could sense an imminent and lengthy discussion of magical theory, to which she would very likely have nothing to contribute, asked Kerring if she could take the rabbit. When Kerring handed her the box, Kim put her hand on the rabbit’s back to keep it from jumping, and felt the by-now familiar tingling of magic run up her arm. Kim took both box and rabbit over to her desk, where she sat staring at the rabbit while it stared back at her and the three men continued their discussion.

 

Hoping it would help her better understand what was going on, Kim picked the rabbit up and held it over the box, concentrating on the specific feel of the magic inside it. After a few moments, Kim realized that the magic was not so much in the rabbit as around it, like the glow of a lamp. Looking more closely, Kim saw that the rabbit was wearing a red leather collar with a tiny silver bell. Struck by a suspicion but uncertain of whether or not to act on it, Kim glanced across the room to Mairelon, Robert, and Kerring. All three were still deeply involved in their discussion. Kim set the rabbit back in the box and took a deep breath, then worked the catch on the collar and pulled it off.

 

At first, nothing seemed to happen beyond the faint chime of the collar’s bell. The rabbit nibbled on a piece of straw. Then Robert gasped, looked up, and came over to stand next to Kim. Mairelon and Kerring followed.

 

“What did you do?” asked Robert. “I mean, whatever it was, it worked, but how?”

 

Kim held out the rabbit’s collar, which was still tingling with magic, and Robert took it from her. “I don’t really know.”

 

“Kim gets hunches about magic,” said Mairelon. Kim looked over at him and read in his expression mingled pride and consternation, along with something else she couldn’t quite place. “They’ve never yet been wrong, but they do tend to add an element of the unexpected.”

 

“Thank you,” said Robert, shutting the rabbit back in its box and heading for the door. “I’m grateful it was so simple. Now I think I need to go have a talk with my sister.”

 

Everyone stood without speaking for a few moments after the door closed behind Robert. Then Kerring turned to Kim and said, “Now, about that paper…”

**Author's Note:**

> For my own amusement, I've included one very obscure reference to Garth Nix's _Sabriel_ and one less obscure reference to Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer's _Sorcery and Ceclia_. Hopefully you'll find them amusing, too.


End file.
